Because of the default settings in several Linux Distros you will not be able to use F10 to exit Midnight Commander. However the solutions is simple.

I use Linux Mint Debian Edition for most of my Linux Desktop usage. And I belive it is the same issue with F10 opens a menu instead of closing Midnight Commander in several other Distros as well.

How to fix it

This is how you can start using F10 to close Midnight Commander. First open the Terminal. In the menu go to Edit and select Preferences. In the preferences window uncheck the options that says “Enable the menu accelerator key”.

Now to need to close the terminal and open it again for the change to take effect. Now you should be able to use F10 to close MC. Enjoy your F10 and MC.

Debian add hard drive

Here I will explain Debian add hard drive. It is a little more to it than just connect the hard drive. Not much more, but a little bit more.

After you have connected the new hard drive to your Debian system and switched it on, your Debian system doesn’t know how to use your new hard drive. Debian knows it is there, but can’t use it for anything.

I have divided the process into four steps.

Debian add hard drive – Step 1

Partition your new hard drive. Even if you don’t need several partitions, you will need to create at least one partition.

sdb is new hard drive here. A small SSD I want to run MySQL databases on.

So we know the hard drive is there. Lets create that partition.

sudo fdisk /dev/sdb

Type n to create a new partition. And accept all default values. Once all the values are accepted, type w to write the new partition table and exit. If you messed up something and don’t want to write the new partition table, type q to exit without saving any changes. Everything you do in fdisk is just saved in memory until you hit w .

Debian add hard drive – Step 2

Format the new hard drive.

Here we decided we want to use ext3 partition on our new drive.

Type in:sudo mkfs.ext3 /dev/sdb1 (sdb1 is the new partition you created in the previous step)

Debian add hard drive – Step 3

Mount the new hard drive

We still can’t use the new hard drive until we mount it. That means we make it useable in our Debian System.

First we create a folder to mount our new hard drive to.

sudo mkdir /disk1

Then we mount sdb1 to the new folder.

sudo mount /dev/sdb1 /disk1

Now your new hard drive should be usable by the system. To verify this, type in df -h You should find something like this: /dev/sdb1 60G 22G 35G 39% /disk1

If you restart your system at this point, you will not see your new hard drive. That’s because we haven’t told the system to mount it automatically on boot.

Debian add hard drive – Step 4

Make the new hard drive automatically mounted on boot.

Open your /etc/fstab file. You can do that with vim, nano or some other text editor. I like vim.sudo vim /etc/fstab

Add this to the bottom of the file./dev/sdb1 /disk1 ext3 defaults 1 2

Save and close the file. In vim you do that by first pressing the ESC key, and type :wq

Debian Versions

Debian versions before version 1.1 were all development versions. The Debian 0.01 was done in August 1993.

Debian 1.0 was not really version 1.0. It was an early development version released by a mistake by a CD vendor, InfoMagic, in December 1995. Personally my first experience with Debian was version 3.0. I found that one difficult to install. It either changed or I knew a little of what I was doing when they released version 3.1 and everything became a lot easier. I tried out some other distributions too, like Fedora, OpenSuse, Mandrake and even Ubuntu. But always came back to Debian. Debian just feels right.

As a little fun fact. All Debian releases are named after Toy Story characters.

Debian versions listDebian 1.1 Buzz – released June 17th, 1996. Actually the first real Debian release as version 1.0 was not version 1.0. And they named the new version 1.1 to avoid confusion about the earlier development release.

Debian 1.2 Rex – December 1996.

Debian 1.3 Bo – June 1997.

Debian 2.0 Hamm – July 1998. For the first time supports the 68K motorola series processors.

Debian 2.1 Slink – March 1999. Alpha and SPARC was added to this version as well.

Debian 2.2 Potato – August, 2000. PowerPC and ARM was added.

Debian 3.0 Woody – July, 2002. IA-64, HP PA-RISC, MIPS and S/390 support was added. Also first version to include KDE.

Debian 3.1 Sarge – June 2005. Unofficial support for AMD64. And the release of they new debian-installer. OpenOffice was also included for the first time.

Debian 4.0 Etch – April 2007. Official support for AMD64 and Motorola 68K series was dropped. Graphical installer was added for the first time.

Debian 5.0 Lenny – February 2009. ARM support was removed and the new ARM (ARM_EABI) was added. Sun Java was added for the first time.

Debian 6.0 Squeeze – February 2011. Alpha and HPPA was dropped.

Debian 7.0 Wheezy – May 2013. Support for armhf was added.

Debian 8.0 Jessie – April 2015. Current version.

Debian 9.0 Stretch – Unknown.

To get Debian, please go to https://www.debian.org It is in my opinion the best Linux Distro out there for servers. And the gold standard in stability. You might not find all the newest linux packages with Debian. But you will have a rock solid server setup. Not a bad desktop OS either.

Debian Debootstrap Error

Debian Debootstrap Error was the message i got while installing Debian 8 on my HP Proliant DL380 G7. Trying several times, and failing with the same message almost every time: Debootstrap Error Some times saying it was not a Debian Install CD-ROM. One user suggested that UNetbootin should be avoided when using bootable install USB. Or else you would end up with Debian Debootstrap Error. UNetbootin have worked just fine in the past, so I figured it should work fine this time too. However I have also installed Debian 8 in past with out any problems. But never on my “new” server. I almost went to the drastically step and downloaded Ubuntu. Just almost 😉

However another user suggested that the CD-Rom was not mounted. And that could be solved directly from the installer. Here is how you do it.

Debian Delete User

This is how to Debian Delete User. Here is two different methods on delete user in Debian. One will keep the users home directory. The other will delete the use and the home directory.

Debian Delete User – Method 1

In this example we will delete the user John. And we will keep his home directory. Because he had some interesting files in there. No, seriously there could be a thousand reasons to keep his home directory. root@debian:/home# deluser john Removing user `john’ … Warning: group `john’ has no more members. Done.

Debian Delete User – Method 2

In this example we will delete the user John and his home directory. We just want to ged rid of it all. Here is how you do it. root@web:/home# deluser –remove-home john Looking for files to backup/remove … Removing files … Removing user `john’ … Warning: group `john’ has no more members. Done.

Now everything is gone. The user and his entire home directory. So that is how you delete users in Debian.